


Illuminate, Explode

by JadeLupine



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Hurt/Comfort, Illness, Insanity, M/M, Prison, Romance, thoughts
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-11
Updated: 2014-03-11
Packaged: 2018-01-15 09:08:14
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,770
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1299412
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JadeLupine/pseuds/JadeLupine
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He needs to go out. He wants to touch the smooth skin of Alana’s cheek and taste the sea-salt of her tears. He wants to break Jack Crawford’s nose with his fist, feel the blood stain his knuckles.<br/>O, he thinks. O, dark.<br/>And the stillness-silence-gone-gone-gone swallows him when he sleeps. <br/>(Zeller, Price, I need your laughter.)<br/>(Hannibal Lecter, I need you.)<br/><i> Will Graham's thoughts and recallations in prison </i></p>
            </blockquote>





	Illuminate, Explode

**Author's Note:**

> Hey, guys, this is an abstract piece of writing, and I'll love it if you commented on this new style?

**i.**

The world is so fragile, and Will is tired of fragility: he wants to be vibrant, explode. He is tired of still-smallness, of wait-without-hope, wait-without-thought, wait-without-love.

And most of all, he thinks viciously, he is tired of Hannibal Lecter.

(O dark, he thinks. Dark dark dark. They all go into the dark.)

He wants to illuminate, explode. The world is shroud-laced; he craves sunlight, moonlight, lamplight, and dawn.

(Dark, dark, dark.)

He needs to go out. He wants to touch the smooth skin of Alana’s cheek and taste the sea-salt of her tears. He wants to break Jack Crawford’s nose with his fist, feel the blood stain his knuckles.

O, he thinks. O, dark.

And the stillness-silence-gone-gone-gone swallows him when he sleeps. 

(Zeller, Price, we need your laughter.)

**ii.**

I have never been to Abigail’s funeral, Will thinks.

It isn’t a funeral, Hannibal, residing quietly in Will’s head, says. There isn’t anything to bury.

(Dark dark dark. 

He wants to explode.) 

He sits in the prison cell and watches as Chilton saunters up with that swagger that only the kidney-less can execute. He smiles at Will, an oily, glowing smile, and takes out his clipboard. He doesn’t need that clipboard, Will thinks, with a rush of anger. He seems too prone to rushes of anger nowadays. Maybe he _was_ becoming a criminal.

Maybe he was always a criminal.

“Hello, Will.”

Don’t say that, Will thinks sharply. You are not Doctor Lecter.

“No.”

“I hear you’ve been eating well, sleeping well.”

“Oh.”

“Will, it is mandatory that you communicate with me.”

“Oh.”

**iii.**

He remembers Hannibal coming up to his house, wind-blown, shadow-eyed; clad in only a shirt and brown pants, and it suits him, and it doesn’t suit him, and he’s never seen the doctor look quite like this: he’s never seen him look quite so human. His eyes are red-black-brown-help and the curve of his neck is aristocratic, and he says, hello, Will, he always says that.

 (Dark.) 

Hannibal kisses him, and takes his hand, and they watch the wind and the beginnings of rain and the sun dipping down towards dark. Maybe we should say something, the doctor says.

 Maybe, he says, but he can’t find any words. 

“Are you happy?” Hannibal says quietly, as they watch the wind and listen to the sun.

“I am.” Will says, and he is surprised.

**iv.**

Will finds a book, and he reads. He wants to read himself to death, he wants to read himself until he faints in that dank prison cell, and in every word he reads, hums a tiny, thoughtless eternity. The voice is not steady inside his head as he reads, it is (of course) Hannibal’s voice, and he wonders, whether Hannibal was feigning heartbreak at the loss of Will, his _dear friend_.

And lover, whispered the voice of the stag. Will thumped his head against the cell.

Am I going mad, he wonders.

O, dark, dark, dark.

But honey, the stag/Hannibal/stag/stag/devil tells him in his ear, all the best people are.

**v.**

It is a very long time ago, and Hannibal is telling him about stories. He is sitting on the edge of his desk, amidst the papers, which don’t seem to matter very terribly any more. Will thinks vaguely that it’s gotten dark and he’s forgotten to turn on the lights, but he doesn’t get up.

(Something is going to break, he thinks, if the lights go on.)

He watches Hannibal’s hands. They are thin and darkened in the long shadows of the heavily furnished room, and the way they move, the rhythm of them as he speaks: he thinks this doctor, this _man_ is stitching the world together.

When I was in France, Lecter tells him, I used to play music in my head.

Yes, Will says. He wants to touch Hannibal, to take hold of his hand.

Hannibal grins suddenly, and Will is surprised, because he knows that the doctor can smile, and chortle, and smirk, but never grin. But yet here he is, his teeth glinting and his eyes flashing stars, and Will falls into him, as if he were the only one there, which he was.

“Am I safe?” Will asks, and he means if Hannibal can lift him away from the headaches and the screams of the stag.

“Yes.” The cannibal replies, and smiles the smile of the devil as he envelops Will in his strong arms, and lets the man’s head rest on his chest. He wants to kiss Hannibal, really, he does, but he does not, instead, he stares at him for a long, long time, until the lines between Hannibal and Will simply blur and thicken.

They don’t kiss.

Would it gone differently if they had?

**vi.**

Will awakes in prison, and he feels tears hot on his skin. He wonders whose they are. Were they from his own blue eyes, did he cry at night, or were they the tears of the stag that screamed and cried though the night. He touches them, they are wet, and he marvels at his own ability to feel, to touch, to hurt.

(stop time turn it back dark dark dark)

He holds his head in his hands, as if by doing this, he could hold his mind together.

It doesn’t work.

Will _screams_ , then, and Barney is brought running, and Chilton awakes sleepily, his eyes glimmering in delight at the insanity of the insane. But Will has stopped screaming, and he is now merely a blank face on a blank body, and blank, void eyes. Barney stays for a while, because that was Barney’s way, and Will sits still in the thundering black stillness, wondering whether (or not) he was wrong, and he had actually killed poor, dear Abigail, with her flowing scarves and pale eyes.

Will finds that he is turning into stone, and he cannot stop, oh, he cannot stop.

**vii.**

Hannibal has come and it is as if he has traversed a thousand years to the ends of the universe, for that is Will’s emotion when he sees him. He is filled with hate and pain and grief and betrayal and underneath it all, the stag screams _lover lover lover_. The air tingles like the onset of a thunderstorm, as Hannibal approaches Will’s cell, and smiles his half-smile, which was once a full smile, back when they kissed at night and fucked in the mornings.

“Hello Will.” He says.

Can’t you say anything else?

“Hello, Doctor Lecter.” Will tries to keep his voice at a minimum and it still closes in on itself, as voices are wont to do.

“I hear you have had an---“

“I don’t want to talk about it. Not with you.” Will says sharply, his eyes glimmering with the remnants of fury.

Tick tock tick tock.

There’s no clock at the asylum.

“Are you still nursing the notion that I am the one who---“ Hannibal begins again.

“Yes.” Will growls, and moves toward the bars of the cell. “Yes. I will nurse it. I will nurse it until the truth comes out, and then, then I’ll continue nursing it until you----are dead and buried.”

“I see.” Hannibal says, and he is so calm---he is so calm that Will wants to fall into him and weep, but this is not Hannibal, he reminds himself.

This is _the stag the stag the stag._

“What’s your favourite book?” Will feels the question shoot out of his mouth, and he shuts it, he is embarrassed, he wants to sleep and never wake up.

“I would think that it has to be---“ Hannibal begins with a gleam in his eyes, some shadowed version of happiness, but it ceases when Will glares at him, fire upon fire upon ice.

“No.” He growls, and he looks almost feral, the prisoner with the staring blue eyes.

“Oh, Will.” Hannibal says----are those _tears_? “When will you let me help you?”

**viii.**

He is watching Chilton’s “hypnotherapy videos”, but his head will never clear, he thinks; he feels the world crushing down on his senses like an iron curtain, and there are curtains flapping, falling in the corners of his mind; curtains crashing over everything past and everything present and everything in-between. Wait-without-hope, he tells himself, but he does not know what it is that he is waiting for. 

(O dark, o dark: the vacant into the vacant. There is a vacancy roaring itself through him, and he is staggered by his own brittleness.)

“I want to see Doctor Lecter.” Will muttered, and of course, Chilton hears the magic word.

“Last time he came, you shut him out, so what’s the use he comes again?” Chilton leaned on his cane, and fluttered his eyes.

“I want to see Alana Bloom.”

“You drove _poor_ Miss Bloom to tears, last time.” Chilton spat a little at the emphasis on _poor_.

“Jack Crawford.”

“He is at the hospital.”

“Beverly Katz.”

“You yelled at her.” Chilton says, unpleasantly. “Remember?”

“Is there _anyone_?” Will feels his voice tear in his throat and tears start to his eyes.

“No. No, Will.” Chilton says. “You have no one. Only me.”

**ix.**

Hannibal comes, at last, and he steps inside the white line, stands closer to Will.

He touches Will’s arm with his free hand, and in their minds they fumble awkwardly for the beginnings of silent goodbyes, because there are no words, there are no words for this. (Wait. Be still.) 

So, Will says, and his face is wet. So.

“Have you been coping?” Hannibal asks, such a typical therapist question.

“Okay.” Will says. “Okay.”

He nods, tremulously.

They listen to the wind that did not blow in the corridors of the prison, and the end of the wind, and curtains rise and fall-flutter-fall in the corners and hallways of their minds. 

“Take me away.” Will says, and for the first time in months, he cannot taste the tinge of human flesh in his mouth. “

“Where?” Hannibal does not usually talk in questions, but with Will, he is not normal, he is not all right, he is not usual.

Wait-without-hope, Will thinks.

There is yet hope, Hannibal thinks.

The world was so grey here, in this dark damp of a prison.  Will remembers the light and warmth and colour of Hannibal’s house, the flashing fireplace and the dull red curtains. He wants to kiss the cannibal’s bright hair, and Will shivers in disgust.

No, he thinks.

Yes.

“Take me away.” He says again, as Hannibal leaves through the small door.

Will is shaking.

Cold, he thinks. It is only the cold.

 

**Author's Note:**

> THANKS FOR READING x  
> ALL FEEDBACK IS APPRECIATED <3


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